SOURCE: “Looking Backward,” in Hudson Review, Vol. 51, No. 1, Spring, 1998, pp. 245–46.

In the following excerpt, Flower states that The Bookshop is “clearly one of [Fitzgerald’s best.”]

Another backward glance must be made at the amazing career of Penelope Fitzgerald, who has published nine superb novels in England since 1977, when she was sixty-one. Although Offshore won the Booker Prize in 1979 and three other works of hers were short-listed for it, Fitzgerald’s novels are hard to find in this country, except for The Blue Flower (1996) and The Bookshop (1978),¹ both recently reissued in paperback. The Bookshop is Fitzgerald’s second novel, and clearly one of her best. Its protagonist, kindhearted Florence Green, attempts to run a bookshop in her soggy little East-Anglian village. But Hardborough discovers, in its provincial wisdom, that it does not want a bookshop, neither one that sells new fiction like Lolita (the date is 1959) or one...